- Deadline
- Passed
Open Society-U.S.’s Soros Justice Fellowships fund outstanding individuals to undertake projects that advance reform, spur debate, and catalyze change on a range of issues facing the U.S. criminal legal system.
We are taking a moment to pause and analyze the future of our three U.S. based fellowship programs. This means we will not be issuing a call for proposals for 2025 fellows, as we would have done this fall.
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Ashley Torres Carrasquillo
2021Ashley Torres Carrasquillo will establish a project that seeks to counter the levels of violence and poverty experienced by mainly Black, disabled, and LGBTQ+ youth in public housing in San Juan, Puerto Rico. -
Carlos Alejandro Bracamontes Norzagaray
2021Carlos Alejandro Bracamontes Norzagaray will empower members of the refugee community to become fully-accredited Department of Justice representatives and provide free representation in immigration proceedings in the Boston area. -
Cloee Cooper
2021Cloee Cooper will develop a deeply reported podcast on how communities are impacted by far-right and paramilitary-aligned sheriffs. -
Contessa Gayles
2021Contessa Gayles and Richie Reseda will create LIFE + LIFE, a documentary and visual album that explores the ways in which this country’s notion of punishment as justice perpetuates cycles of harm. -
Emily Tucker
2021Emily Tucker will educate the public about the harm caused by replacing mass incarceration with mass surveillance, and support efforts to challenge the negative impacts of mass surveillance on peoples’ lives. -
Kilroy Watkins
2021Kilroy Watkins will create an initiative to support survivors of police torture and long-term incarceration in their efforts to productively make their way into free society. -
Lam Thuy Vo
2021Lam Thuy Vo will write articles that explore the nexus between gentrification and overpolicing, each centered around characters and communities whose stories are contextualized through data-and documents-driven research. -
Leidy Perez-Davis
2021Leidy Perez-Davis will help elevate the voices of a network led by asylum seekers and support members to collectively identify the best methods to end the punitive practices and incarceration of asylum seekers. -
Lis-Marie Alvarado
2021Lis-Marie Alvarado will use arts-based organizing and cultural healing to work with unaccompanied immigrant children from Central America harmed by detention. -
May Jeong
2021May Jeong will write a book, The Life: Sex, Work and Love in America, that examines inequality in America through the prism of sex work. -
Monica Cosby
2021Monica Cosby will create a network of women impacted by the criminal legal system to help challenge the harmful narratives surrounding the dichotomy of violent and nonviolent crime in that system and in society at large. -
PJ Raval
2021PJ Raval will produce In Plain Sight, a docuseries that will reframe the immigrant experience and culture of incarceration, through an exploration of the lives of artists working to resist the migrant detention system. -
Richie Reseda
2021Richie Reseda and Contessa Gayles will create LIFE + LIFE, a documentary and visual album that explores the ways in which the notion of punishment as justice perpetuates cycles of harm. -
Tiheba Bain
2021Tiheba Bain will build a coalition of diverse women, who will use their voices and lived experiences to raise awareness of the discrimination faced by women living with violent convictions. -
Veronica Torres
2021Veronica Torres will work to vindicate the rights of the hundreds of people in Arizona prisons who have a viable claim for parole or opportunity for release. -
Willette Benford
2021Willette Benford will create the Cost of Dignity Project, which will support and elevate the leadership of Black women impacted by the criminal legal system. -
Yusef Presley
2021Yusef Presley will produce a series of short videos that seek to elevate the voices and experiences of youth directly impacted by the foster care and juvenile justice systems in Kansas. -
Alexandra Smith
2008Alexandra Smith will monitor New York State prisons compliance with new legislation diverting prisoners with serious psychiatric disabilities from solitary confinement. -
Brackette Williams
2008Brackette Williams will study individuals in Arizona who spent one or more years in solitary confinement and identify how it affects their re-entry into society, family, and community. -
Caroline Cincotta
2008Federal prisons bar noncitizens from participating in rehabilitative programs, subjecting them to longer sentences and harsher conditions; Cincotta will develop legal challenges to these discriminatory policies. -
Craig Gilmore
2008Craig Gilmore will create multimedia primers on the U.S. prison system to assist activists and organizations working to challenge mass incarceration. -
Harry Levine
2008Harry Levine will research the alarming trend toward race, gender, and age bias in marijuana possession arrests. -
Janet Moore
2008Janet Moore will work to reform Ohio's current system for providing legal counsel to low-income residents. -
Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, Ronald Cotton, and Erin Torneo
2008Thompson-Cannino, Cotton, and Torneo will co-write a book illuminating the problematic role of eyewitness testimony in wrongful conviction. -
Joshua Perry
2008In New Orleans, indigent defendants often face months of pretrial detention and endure harsh over-sentencing; Joshua Perry will coordinate special litigation efforts at the Orleans Public Defenders to alleviate these problems.
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Year
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Brandon Brown
2024Brandon Brown and Catherine Besteman will educate, coordinate, and interrupt the flow of people into prisons through building a robust, reparative, healing alternative to incarceration in the wake of harm. -
Catherine Besteman
2024Catherine Besteman and Brandon Brown will educate, coordinate, and interrupt the flow of people into prisons through building a robust, reparative, healing alternative to incarceration in the wake of harm. -
Claudia Muñoz-Castellano
2024Claudia Muñoz-Castellano will educate and create a Texas statewide legal empowerment program to combat the alarming rise in criminalizing policies and practices that target immigrants. -
Deborah Small
2024Deborah Small will study the impact of local efforts to “reimagine public safety,” focusing on the effectiveness of the initiatives, enhancing trust between law enforcement and the community, and addressing systemic issues. -
Elizabeth Kennedy
2024Elizabeth Kennedy will research deportees to El Salvador and Honduras, focusing on youth, Indigenous and Garifuna communities, the LGBTQI+ population, and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. -
George Morton
2024George Morton will establish an initiative that elevates the vast expanse of Black narratives and fosters the transformation of Black people as artists and art subjects. -
Gina Jackson
2024Gina Jackson and Lea Wetzel will build a national model of peer support and best practices for missing and murdered Indigenous Womxn (MMIW/G). -
Kelly Davis
2024Kelly Davis will research the needs and experiences of pregnant people who have been incarcerated, to inform and advance a broader policy agenda based on gender-based violence, reproductive justice, and criminal justice reform. -
Lauren Faraino
2024Lauren Faraino will engage in legal and storytelling advocacy to investigate, and expose, and halt the unlawful practice of harvesting organs of people who die while incarcerated without family permission. -
Laverne Thompson
2024Laverne Thompson will craft a dynamic community archive of the groundbreaking efforts of Louisiana’s advocates and visionaries who paved the way for criminal justice reform in Louisiana. -
Lea Wetzel
2024Lea Wetzel and Gina Jacksin will build a national model of peer support and best practices for missing and murdered Indigenous Womxn (MMIW/G). -
Nia Lee
2024Lee will spearhead a national series for justice-impacted Black and Brown queer women, femmes, trans, and gender-expansive individuals to create a platform for dialogue, community building, and transformative justice spaces. -
Temi Mwale
2024Temi Mwale will examine how technology produces state violence and harm through the criminalization of Black communities, with a unique focus on the parallels between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. -
Tijanna Eaton
2024Tijanna Eaton will support authors who have served time in United States prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers, with wraparound coaching and services to develop books sharing their vital stories.